Although Beauvoir was starting to mix with the crème de la crème of 1940s Paris arts, she was also feeling the scarcity that was the abnormal normality of life under the Occupation. Fuel for heat had become scarce, as had food. Between 1938 and 1942, milk consumption halved and bread prices nearly doubled. The allied forces continued to target strategic ports, factories and stations.
On 20 and 21 April the northern parts of Paris were bombed by the allies. It was a controversial aspect of Operation Overlord, intended to disrupt all rail traffic leading into northern France. On 21 April the La Chapelle marshalling yards were hit, killing 641 people and wounding nearly 400 more. Sartre and Beauvoir were in La Pouèze, but Bost wrote to them describing the terrifying noise and the deafening thought of ending up a corpse in a pile of rubble. The previous month Bourla – Nathalie Sorokine’s Jewish boyfriend – was arrested with his father. They didn’t know it but he had already been transferred to Auschwitz.22 But although the Nazi flag was still flying over the Senate people were talking about liberation, and from 19 August they could almost taste it. The Germans were retreating eastwards, and the French Resistance had placed posters all over the city calling citizens to arms. Sartre was stretched thin so Beauvoir wrote some articles for Combat under his byline.23
On 25 August 1944 Beauvoir was at Bost and Olga’s room in the Hôtel Chaplain along with Wanda and Sorokine. They had cooked some potatoes for dinner, and as they ate them they heard the announcement on the radio: General de Gaulle was in Paris. People started to cheer and shout in the street – in front of the Dôme people were thronging near the rue Vavin. But then there were tanks; the crowds fled from gunshots and SS cars.
The next day the French flag was raised on the Eiffel Tower. De Gaulle marched through Paris, down the Champs-Elysées with French and American troops. Beauvoir and Olga cheered from the Arc de Triomphe.
The war was not over, but Paris was free.
The second volume of Beauvoir’s autobiography covered the period from 1930–1944. It was only late in that period that her own writing began to be published, and The Prime of Life brushes very quickly over her philosophical preoccupations and achievements, giving what looks to many like disproportionate credit to Sartre. But the memoirs do not conceal that she read voluminously, including works on philosophy, psychology, religion and (although such material was much scarcer) women’s sexuality. During this time she read Alfred Adler, Alain, American literature, Aron, Bergson, Georges Bernanos, Dostoevsky, Drieu La Rochelle, English literature, what she called ‘entertaining trash’,24 Faulkner, Freud, Gide, Julien Green, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Heidegger, Hemingway, Holderlin, Husserl, Jaspers, Joyce, Kafka, Kierkegaard, La Rochefoucauld, Leibniz, Michel Leiris, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Maritain, François Mauriac, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Proust, Raymond Queneau, Saint-Exupery, Scheler, Sketkel’s Frigidity in Women, Stendahl, Stoics, Valéry, Jean Wahl, Oscar Wilde and more Virginia Woolf.
So what was it that she omitted? Although written in 1943, Beauvoir’s first philosophical essay Pyrrhus and Cinéas was published in September 1944, after the liberation. However, it was only published in an English translation in 2004; readers without French were not able to follow the full story of the philosophical dialogue between Sartre and Beauvoir, or to see the development of Beauvoir’s thinking in her own right. Pyrrhus and Cinéas raised serious moral questions and inaugurated what Beauvoir called ‘the moral period’ of her literary career. Whether it was the war, her relationship with Bost, her narrow escape from the Sorokine affair, her realization that she and Sartre had harmed Bianca Bienenfeld, concern not to be associated with all Sartre’s views – or, more likely, a combination of many of these factors – she wanted to know now: (how) could actions – and relationships – be ethical? And before answering these moral questions she had to answer a more basic existential one: why do anything rather than nothing?
When Sartre’s magnum opus Being and Nothingness was published in 1943 it was criticized by many of his contemporaries for painting a very bleak picture of humanity. After hundreds of dense and depressing pages analysing the human condition, Sartre dedicated a mere two and a half pages to ethics. He wrote that bad faith leads many to the nihilistic conclusion that ‘it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations’.25 Sartre didn’t clearly say here why it doesn’t amount to the same thing, nor did he elaborate on how the nihilist is wrong – for example, by saying why life does have meaning, or how it can be lived authentically. Instead, he offered his reader a list of unanswered questions: Could freedom itself be the source of all value, the reason human lives matter? Or did freedom have to be, as many religious philosophers thought, defined in relation to a ‘transcendent value’ (that is, God)?26
Like Beauvoir, Sartre had been fascinated by the concept of freedom and the human desire for meaning since his student days. Both of them wondered whether ‘a transcendent’ such as God was needed to give human freedom value and life meaning. But, unlike Beauvoir, he had not yet seen a way to incorporate ethics into his philosophy of freedom, and solve the problem of the transcendent. Beauvoir would express her answer in several literary forms: an essay, a novel and a play. But the essay and the play were not translated into English until the twenty-first century, and the novel was widely read as an ‘existentialist’ novel in which Beauvoir applied Sartre’s ideas in fictional form. So it has been mistakenly assumed that Sartre developed the ethics of existentialism, one of the most popular movements in twentieth-century philosophy, when in fact, Beauvoir did – and in 1945 she said outright that that was what she, not Sartre, was doing.
Pyrrhus and Cinéas begins with a conversation between Pyrrhus and Cinéas. Pyrrhus is the king of Epirus, in the 4th century BCE; Cinéas is his advisor. They are discussing Pyrrhus’ plan to conquer the world when Cinéas asks him: What difference did it make whether one conquered the world or rested at home?27 Beauvoir agreed with Sartre that human beings make projects. They set goals and make limits for themselves, but those goals can always be surpassed or the limits redrawn. And even when we achieve the very thing we’re after, we’re often disappointed. Sometimes reaching our aim makes us realize we were in it for the pursuit; sometimes, once we achieve it, we no longer want it. So what is the point of acting, and why should we care whether we act ethically? Being and Nothingness ended on a note much like Cinéas’ line above – that it doesn’t make any difference whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.
But how could anyone think that? Beauvoir thought it did make a difference: the drunk has a different situation from that of the leader of nations, and different power to shape the worlds of others. Weaving scenes from life into paragraphs of philosophy, she wrote:
I knew a child who cried because her concierge’s son had died. Her parents let her cry, and then they got annoyed. ‘After all, that little boy was not your brother.’ The child dried her tears. But that was a dangerous thing to teach. Useless to cry over a little boy who is a stranger: so be it. But why cry over one’s brother?28
Whatever else she had become, Beauvoir had not lost the incomprehension she felt when she saw her parents’ indifference to the death of their concierge’s child. But she knew there was a problem: if we open our eyes to the world’s wrongs there’s so much suffering and injustice that we can’t cry for it all; we’d never stop. Our capacities are finite and we don’t always know what to care about. If we identify with all the members of our sex or country or class, or with all of humanity, then we are increasing the scope of our care in words only.
The question is: what part of the world is ours to care for and cultivate? Our actions. That is Beauvoir’s answer to the question – why act? – because your action is the only thing that is yours and yours alone, the means by which you become who you are. Only you can create or sustain the ties that unite you to others, for better or worse.29 Your relationships with others are not givens: they have to be recreated, day by day, and
they can be cultivated to flourishing or neglected and abused to death.30
For over a decade Beauvoir had been discussing the concept of freedom with Sartre, and attempting to live her life by the philosophy she believed in, just as she had formerly lived her life for the God she once loved. But it wasn’t working: it wasn’t liveable. The year that Sartre famously called other people ‘hell’ in his play No Exit, Beauvoir was publishing a philosophical rebuttal of his view. We are not alone in the world, and, contrary to Sartre, she thought that we would be miserable if we were, for it is only with others that our own projects can succeed. Pyrrhus and Cinéas returns to the themes of love and devotion, developing the lines of thought that she had sketched in her student diaries. Now Beauvoir wrote that everyone wants to feel at rest about the meaning of their lives. But the ‘rest’ that the devoted person claims for him- or – more commonly – herself is to live for another being. Some people claim to find that rest in God and some people find that rest in being devoted to other humans.31
But trying to justify one’s existence through devotion is problematic. For one thing, the object of devotion may be irritated if your entire happiness rests on her acceptance of something she didn’t ask for. Devotion to others can become tyrannical, if through devotion we limit the other’s freedom against their desire. So Beauvoir wanted to know – since so many human beings seem to want to be devoted to another – is it possible to be devoted without being a tyrant?32
It was crystal clear now: she needed a different understanding of freedom from the one Sartre offered. She couldn’t agree with him that freedom was limitless: our choices are constrained by the choices of others, and we constrain their choices too. Striving to be free, therefore, wasn’t good enough – any person who valued freedom without hypocrisy had to value it in other people, to act in such a way that they exercised their freedom ethically.33
Beauvoir wanted her readers to come away with the point that our actions shape the worlds of the others in our lives, producing the conditions in which they act. She was disavowing her former political disengagement, certainly. But it is unclear how much to attribute this to her circumstances, and whether to assign greater weight to the historical moment of the Second World War or her own personal life. Even as a ‘necessary’ love Beauvoir suffered in her relationship with Sartre; and over time she realized that their relationship affected ‘contingent’ others in ways that were harmful. Years had passed since Beauvoir upbraided Sartre for the break-up letter he sent Bianca and she was now married to Bernard Lamblin – but Bianca had sought Beauvoir out again after the war: she was desperately unhappy. In 1945 Beauvoir wrote to Sartre again about their responsibility for her suffering. She had been talking with Bianca until midnight one night and was filled with remorse: ‘she’s suffering from an intense and dreadful attack of neurasthenia, and it’s our fault, I think. It’s the very direct, but profound, after-shock of the business between her and us. […] we have harmed her’.34 (Bianca’s psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, would later agree.35)
When Pyrrhus and Cinéas was published, it was a success. Indeed, in Force of Circumstance Beauvoir wrote that its reception was ‘an encouragement to return to philosophy’.36 She had subtly treated arguments from Benjamin Constant, Hegel, Spinoza, Flaubert, Kafka, Kant and Maurice Blanchot, rejecting them all. But she attributed her success to the French public’s having been starved of philosophy during the Occupation, downplaying the significance of her own role in the development of existentialism.
Figure 7 Simone de Beauvoir at work in Les Deux Magots, 1944.
Did she not see the significance herself? Fortunately for us, an interview from 1945 survives showing that she did. In Les lettres françaises Beauvoir expressed no concerns about the philosophical deprivation of the public but rather focused on the philosophical deficiencies of Sartre’s system. In Beauvoir’s own words: ‘No ethics is implied in existentialism. I have sought, for my part, to extract one from it. I expounded it in Pyrrhus and Cinéas, which is an essay, then I tried to express the solution that I found in a novel and a play, that is to say in forms at once more concrete and ambiguous.’37 So why would she omit this significant philosophical contribution from her account of her own life? In order to understand the answer to this question, we need to understand more of the path that led her to choose to become such a different self in public.
10
Queen of Existentialism
In January 1945 the United States State Department had sponsored eight French Resistance journalists to come to the United States and report on the American war effort, and Camus had invited Sartre. Sartre was elated: he had grown up watching westerns and reading thrillers and loved the idea of America. Some of the reality lived up to his expectations, but other parts fell woefully short. He was overwhelmed by its racism and the extremes he saw between the impoverished and the wealthy. He was also astonished by a woman he met at a New York radio station: a journalist by the name of Dolores Vanetti. Between the wars she had been an actress in Montparnasse, and had noticed the intellectuals in the Dôme and the Coupole. She had a low voice and – importantly, for Sartre – her mother tongue was French.1 Before long, amitié became amour.
Beauvoir heard little from Sartre while he was away. She read his reports in Combat and Le Figaro, and she occasionally had news of him from Camus, who spoke to him by phone when he had a story to file. But she wasn’t home to receive his letters anyway; in February Beauvoir went to Portugal for five weeks to visit Hélène and Lionel, now married. She gave lectures at the French Institute in Lisbon and wrote articles for Combat. It had been nearly five years since the sisters had last seen each other. Hélène was shocked to see her sister’s worn clothes and Spartan shoes. The standard of living in Portugal was much higher than in France; so Simone returned with a new wardrobe for herself and gifts for ‘the family’.2
In March Sartre wrote to say that he would stay a little longer in New York, until the end of May. On 29 April 1945 France held the first elections in which women had a right to vote. On 7 May Germany signed the act of military surrender in Reims; on 8 May it was signed in Berlin. In Europe, the war was over.
That June Sartre turned 40, and hated it. He decided to resign from teaching and throw himself wholly into writing. But he was feeling down for another reason, too: things were getting more serious with Dolores Vanetti, and despite the fact that she was a married woman she refused to be part of his life if Beauvoir was part of it too. There was no reason to write to her, Vanetti told him: it was over. By July Sartre couldn’t bear to be at odds with Vanetti anymore and wrote to her. She replied encouragingly – maybe they could make things work after all. On 6 and 9 August the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered.
After the war, the names Sartre and Beauvoir were everywhere.3 Because of both her increased popularity and because her intellectual reputation became so firmly aligned with Sartre’s and what they now, reluctantly, called ‘existentialism’, 1945 marked a significant turning point for Beauvoir’s public image. That summer and autumn, between them, they released over half a dozen publications: novels, lectures, a play and a new periodical. In the space of a single week in October 1945 Sartre gave one of his most famous lectures (with the title ‘Existentialism: Is it a Humanism?’), Beauvoir’s play Useless Mouths opened, and the first issue of a new periodical, co-founded by Beauvoir and Sartre, was published. Paris news kiosks now sold monthly issues of their intellectual progeny, Les Temps Modernes. But the first issues bore only Sartre’s name as ‘Directeur’.
Named after Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 comedy Modern Times, Les Temps Modernes was a literary, philosophical and political magazine. The magazine – which is still in existence as of 2019 – was heralded as a much needed ‘third voice’ between the Marxist and Christian discourses that dominated French politics. For Sartre and Beauvoir, it was a vehicle that enabled them to be ‘engaged intellectuals’ who focused on the pressing issues of the day. And it fed a
hungry audience: In 1944, a law had been passed forbidding the publication of newspapers that had been published under Vichy occupation. Hundreds of periodicals were affected; only Resistance newspapers (such as Combat and Libération) and mainstream press from the Unoccupied zone (e.g., Le Figaro on the right, Le Populaire (socialist) or L’Humanité (communist)) survived. Collaborationist writers were tried and severely punished as part of a purge, which some writers described as a ‘surgical operation’ needed to restore France’s ‘social health’.4 In addition to her editorial work on Les Temps Modernes, in the first years of its existence Beauvoir published several important essays on ethics and politics in it.
But there was a downside to launching so much with Sartre. Beauvoir’s 1945 novel, The Blood of Others, tells two people’s stories. But only one of them is described on the back cover of the Penguin edition:
Jean Blomart, privileged bourgeois turned patriot leader against the Nazi Occupation, waits through the endless night for his lover Hélène to die. Flashbacks interweave the stories of both their lives until, with dawn approaching, Jean faces a momentous decision.
The Blood of Others, written during the Occupation and published in 1945, portrays the agony of the French Resistance and the inner distress and awakening of a man impelled by anger and obsessed with family guilt. It remains one of Simone de Beauvoir’s most gripping dramatizations of the existentialist’s search to reconcile responsibility for others with personal happiness.5
According to this description, this is the story of a man’s awakening. Hélène appears only to die, passively providing personal tragedy to heighten the drama of her hero’s choice and action. But the novel is about more than one person’s awakening: Hélène also discovers her responsibility to others – but the obstacles barring that discovery are not identical to the obstacles faced by her man.
Becoming Beauvoir Page 20